


Solitary

by Catznetsov



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Historical, Fae & Fairies, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-07-20 13:59:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16138718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/pseuds/Catznetsov
Summary: “Oh, she doesn’t think it’s good to be a musician anymore,” Zhenya said. “She says musicians today have become so disreputable. Out all night, and all day only composing noise."“That was about me,” Sasha said.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hypocorism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypocorism/gifts).



1911

Water hesitated for a heartbeat at the lip of the stone and then spilled over, slicking down the walls that had been the old mill-house’s foundation. Perhaps it should have been a warning to a climber, that a hold could seem solid until it slipped away, but he was not especially inclined to be warned. 

He did the strap of his case over his head and lay it safe between the roots of a birch tree, out of the sun and any possible spray of mist, before beginning to find fingerholds in the face of the mill, picking between cavities dark with algae to pull himself up hand over hand. It helped to be almost half as tall as the crumbling wall already, and Sasha had done rather stupider things for less. If one of the littler boys had tried he might have needed a lift, but this far past the railway there was little to tempt them.

Perching on top of the wall, the sound of the unseen violin arced over his head, pooling out over the water and crashing down with the falls. Not so long ago the first waterfall had spun the mill-wheel at the hill’s feet; now it poured into the mill-house, cracked open. Here at this end the surface was a clouded mirror close under the overarching tree branches, a dusty dark like the mines sunk deeper farther up the mountain, only broken by an occasional jeweled leaf. At the other the stone face rose slowly, worn bare by the falls and and softened by drifting mist.

A leaf spun into his feet and flickered away between them. He spread his hands and pushed up to stand, stepping toe to toe along the top of the wall. Closer, another flash of color, green in the water, and he did not look down. That was how other boys who dared this always slipped, soaked their shoes and coats and scraped their palms catching themselves, and that was before the week of midsummer.

Now the violin seemed to sing out with his steps, a rhythm slotting home for him to follow, and then just a little faster.

There was a round hollow behind the waterfall where the axle of the waterwheel had once been bolted into the stone, a comfortable dark just larger than he could have put his arms around. He kept his face tipped towards it but his eyes unfocused, as if on the hazy sunlight on the fall, because manners are manners, and more than that when you are a guest in a nixie’s house, and prefer not be its next meal.

Sasha thumbed the button of his coat pocket to find the bottle and knelt slow. He had not brought a glass from the boarding house, because he did not want to risk falling to land on one, and more because Sasha Mikhailovich, who shared the room, never washed them. So he only cracked the seal, kept the cap and went to set the open bottle out in from of him. 

The boy in the waterfall took it from his hand, and eyed the milk whisky cautiously. He had laid the violin and bow across his knee, one hand caging the neck and fingers curling over the frog. The little white hunting dog who ambled everywhere after him was sprawled across his feet, eyes closed, a velvety pool of ears and tail easy, and everything about them both was thin like the light through new leaves or the last ice, even so late in the year. His hands looked improbably fine after Sasha’s around the bottle, impossibly narrow against the strings.

He seemed to taste the air over the bottle, tip of his tongue to his teeth, and gave Sasha a reproachful look.

“Tell it to Sasha Mikhailovich,” Sasha said. “He wanted something from the bottom drawer and now no one knows where anything went, or I would have brought you honey wine.” 

The nixie sighed at him, but he raised the bottle and took a harsh swig of the pale liquor, and then he lifted the violin to his cheek again.

If you pay a nixie with a pure black cat, or a story he has never heard, or with alcohol, they will teach you to play their songs. Now, if you yourself had been there, unless you have paid, the nixie’s song would have sounded a little like the old one from the south, which has been rewritten many times and now is sung _sleep, my child, while the moon watches over your cradle, and I will sing you stories,_ and goes on for very long time after that about the boys who grow up to be vityaz, Russia’s heroes, and all the wars the mountains there have seen. 

Sasha had no idea if the one the nixie played had words, and had never wondered about it, because the reason they were friends was that they were both absolutely mad about the violin. 

The melody seemed quite simple, but as it went it wandered, high and breaking then falling low, wild even as it returned to the inevitable chorus. As it went on and on and the nixie laid out the lines to be examined and then returned to them, his hands lifted into flight, and you could see it was a teaching song. The bow hand always floated over the strings, as firmly gentle as if the wooden frog were a real one. Sasha, who tended to saw through his bow hairs, ignored that hint to watch how the nixie’s left hand leapt from the low notes down the neck to the highest. The song was slow enough he didn’t especially need to, but he liked Sasha to know that he could.

Sasha’s own left hand was broad enough he could slip his fourth finger down to find that note without shifting at all, but he was almost envious and enchanted by how you would if you had to, and maybe one of the littler boys who did not yet have what his roommate Sasha Mikhailovich referred to as Sasha’s paws would like to learn it.

A long weed-like straggling lock of the nixie’s hair unraveled down his cheek towards his eyes, and just then the little hunting dog who had been drowsily spilling into Sasha’s lap sat up, and growled. 

Someone mortal was moving down below. 

The nixie startled, fingers stinging and strangling the strings, his bow hand darting to knock the hair out of his eyes to see. Sasha caught his wrist, just the tips of two fingers on it to settle him, and the nixie looked from the edge to the dog to Sasha’s face and back again with miserable, mad green eyes.

“You’re all right,” Sasha told him. “You are. I’ll see.” Maybe it was one of the cleverest girls from town, hunting for the first elusive blackberries before anyone else would have jam to sell, or one of the stupider boys, hunting Sasha. But when he looked down between the branches it was only an ordinary hunter, out of breath, rustling through the leaves towards the stream. 

Through the trees, out ahead of him, a pale smudge leapt up, as if Sasha were leaning out and looking at the reflection of his own face in deep water. As it ran its light grew, and it became a bright bird, flashing over the loam and stones and then the waters of the rushing millstream. Its wingtip cut the surface and sent up a haze like steam from the summer sun before it was off and away into the trees on the other side, leaving the hunter’s faint voice cursing out of site under the wall.

The little dog’s tail beat against Sasha’s knees, but when he turned the nixie looked no better at all. “I have to go,” he said, or something like it, tripping over the Russian sounds.

The dog sighed, but its tail went still as it looked loyally to him.

“What was that?” Sasha asked them.

“My day,” the nixie said, slow. “Now it’s passing, and evening will be by soon, and night, and I am promised to go north to Iriy to see the White Tsar after midsummer.” As he went the words came faster, tripping and stopping before rushing out again.

“All right,” Sasha said, and let his hand fall back before the nixie might think he’d try to hold him.“All right. Do you want to go?” and then, “Do you want me to?”

And you may understand, if not forgive entirely, everything Sasha would do after that, because the nixie shook his head so drops of water fell from his hair, and bit at his own mouth with needle teeth, and when he opened it he whispered the three most powerful words you can say, which are, “Please help me.” He was gone with a great splash before Sasha could think of words for an answer, which admittedly took him a long time.

When Sasha landed damply at the foot of the wall, so was his violin. 


	2. Chapter 2

The walk back down past the railroad tracks and into town was long enough to regret all your choices and then grow bored of it. Sasha walked slowly and bored quick, so by the time he saw the boardinghouse the sky was turning colors and he had decided to be entirely at peace with the situation. 

The key to their room had been tucked into the rosin box inside his case. If he went up to the third floor and hammered on doors, eventually someone would shout at him and know where Sasha Mikhailovich had swanned off to. He must be looking for Sasha by now, and Sasha could go make him let him back in. But instead he wrung a little more pond water out of his shirt and went on to the little shop next door. 

Calling it a music shop would have been generous. Inside it looked like junk shop, or the sort of grandfather’s attic who thought he could get something for all of it at a junk shop someday and never would in case prices might go up in the future. But it was a junk shop owned by a certain family, with a particular eye, and if you lived at the lip of Siberia and loved music you would have known the name. 

Sasha stepped around a trunk someone had tried to shove across the floor, and between stacks of books, until he found the shop counter. A little more searching found a copper bell on a shelf, and he flicked at it until a shop assistant tumbled out from somewhere on top of another. 

“I’d like to buy a violin,” Sasha told him.

The boy brushed his sweater off, and blinked contemplatively up at him. “Oh, good,” he said. “That’s a useful coincidence.” He helped himself up and padded back behind the counter, peering under it and patting his pockets for a key.

“Have you got one?” Sasha asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know I can sell to just anyone, anyway,” the boy said, starting to work on a locked cupboard under the counter and vanishing into it except for a puff of pale hair. “Why are you wet?” 

“Why were you climbing?” Sasha said. “Does Uncle Zhenya let you up to move the stock?”

“Mostly no. And I wasn’t,” Zhenya Yevgenyevich said. Bouncing back up onto his toes didn’t make him look taller so much as it fixed his slouch for half a second, and at least slightly larger around the middle than the linen bundle he was holding. He hefted it onto the counter, and looked to Sasha until he obliged and lifted the corner of the cloth. 

There was his violin, the body a familiar honey gold, long enough you started to be suspicious it was a young cello, the two rougher pegs his mother had carved for replacements.

“It’s only been an hour,” Sasha said. “You can’t have gone out and gotten into this already.”

“It finds me,” Zhenya Yevgenyevich said, with a tsarevna’s dignity and his rather heavy country accent. “I’m only here like always, sweeping, and man comes in, says he has an instrument to sell. So I say we do sell those, and buy them too, and he says his father left it to him and I say well let me see it. That order, so I know. So he shows it to me and I say his father had good taste in violins but he must have died rather young, and he looks at me and probably that’s why he leaves with less than he wanted to ask for it.”

“Thank you,” Sasha said. “And you know you’re supposed to find me if Auntie’s out and someone comes in with stolen things, or Constable Abramov, or Mikhailovich if you really have to.”

“You were at the river finding trouble without me,” Zhenya Yevgenyevich said, “and anyway he was quite polite except the stealing and I do think he was sorry he had to.”

Sasha set that aside, which was usually best when Zhenya started arguing the rules, and said, “How much did you pay him for my violin?”

“Well,” Zhenya Yevgenyevich said, and stopped at that.

“I’d like it back. I’m buying it back,” Sasha said, because sometimes it helped to say the rules step by step. He was not sure which of them it helped, but it certainly seemed to. 

“Well,” Zhenya said. He poked at the bundle again, and Sasha obediently drew it closer to him. When Zhenya stared again he lifted it as if to play, and now he could see the long sharp crack running down its back.

“So it wasn’t so much, really,” Zhenya Yevgenyevich said. There was just a thread of darkness, between the two side where they bent away and you could see into the belly of the violin. Sasha ran his thumb over it. 

While he was standing there Zhenya dropped the keys, with a little clatter, bent and swept them up and hurried off to some cabinet Sasha didn’t turn to see. He came padding back, this time with a lighter case in his arms. He laid it on the empty cloth, and when Sasha didn’t, he flicked the lock and lifted out the second violin.

“I don’t know I can sell to just anyone,” he said. “But then if that’s mine now, I won’t need two. So while I fix mine,—that one—you look after this one. Then you bring my grandmother’s—this one—back tomorrow, I won’t need two, I’ll think, oh, why not, you look after that one for me.”

The little violin was the color of pine pitch, and the air tasted of it too, most of a hundred years of rosin. Sasha could have covered it with both his hands, and Zhenya Yevgenyevich almost looked big enough for it. Now Zhenya’s hands fluttered up like birds, and he caught them and pinned them back against the counter, waiting.

“Don’t you think she wants you to have it?” Sasha tried.

“Oh, she doesn’t think it’s good to be a musician anymore, now she has her arthritis,” Zhenya said. “I can’t play that so well anyway. She doesn't think much of musicians today. She says a lot about it. She says musicians today have become so disreputable.”

“That was about me,” Sasha said.

“Out all night, and all day only composing noise, like that Stravinsky,” Zhenya went on, and turned lamp-like alleycat eyes on him. 

He had liked all the flourishes of the Firebird when Sasha played as much as he could figure for him, before his mother mentioned Sasha’s tickets to Sankt Peterburg, heavy now on the dresser in his and Mikhailovich’s room. Sasha could admit to practicing it louder than was strictly necessary, but that was only when Sasha Mikhailovich was trying to nap, and only because then you could hear it in the upstairs bedroom whose window faced theirs across the arm’s length gap of the alley, and that was where Zhenya slept. 

So that was another bite at Sasha, but not from Baba Yulia. Sasha was going to play for the conservatory masters for however long before they agreed to send him on again to Paris, the ballet and their orchestra. Zhenya, who still hid his hands after practicing as though if no one could see his fourth fingers no one would know they stung from reaching for the notes, might never. 

The nixie’s had looked a little like that, and Sasha had thought maybe that was something you could earn.

“All right. Don’t fix it tonight,” he said, and Zhenya only smiled. He tugged at the corner of the cloth again, and Sasha set the violin on it. Zhenya left it unwrapped on the counter between them, passing the second ceremoniously over. It weighed as much as a bird, all trapped air, in Sasha’s hands, and he couldn’t wish he were holding the other instead. 

“I won’t be in,” he said. “I have to go out, for a friend, who…well. I’ll tell you all about it,” he added, and then thought of the dangers of promising when he didn’t know how long it could be, mostly being woken up before dawn by Zhenya throwing crumpled papers at him through the two windows. “When I see you again.”

There was a rap at the door, as Sasha Mikhailovich’s patience must have lost the battle with Sasha Mikhailovich. Sasha turned and waved him off, but when he turned back Zhenya was still watching him like that hungry little cat.

“Go on. You should be in bed,” Sasha said, and got nothing. 

“One thing,” he tried again. “Don’t go out tonight. Not while the rusalkiy are walking. Not at midsummer.”

“All right,” Zhenya promised at last. “I’ll stay, fix it tonight,” and Sasha left with that. 


	3. Chapter 3

Mikhailovich, who could taste trouble baking as well as ginger cakes across town, complained the whole way down past the railroad tracks. But Sasha walked faster to get away from him, so by the time they were climbing over boulders into the growing woods, it was only just sunset.

“How far is it to Vyriy from here?” Sasha asked, when Sasha Mikhailovich had taken a long pause to meditate on his faults as a roommate.

Sasha Mikhailovich looked back at him. “As far as birds fly for the winter,” he said, and bit his tongue on something more.

“Watch where you go, I’m not carrying you,” Sasha told him, and, “Oh. Well then.”

“We can’t go that far tonight,” Sasha Mikhailovich said. “I won’t.”

“Well if you keep up, don’t make me late to meet him, we don’t have to,” Sasha said, picking up his pace so he could get away with saying it. 

Sasha Mikhailovich tripped over a rock. “Sam,” he said, when he’d caught himself, his voice transposing down to a tighter key. “Why are we going?”

“Eighteen years Auntie dropped you in my arms, and I didn’t drop you, and you haven’t let me alone,” Sasha said. “So someone needs friends now, and I suppose he could do worse than you.”

That was not as much as Sasha Mikhailovich would have liked, but the hillside picked up and he saved his breath for climbing. They were following a tributary of the stream, cutting between curves of the cart track that had served the first copper mine, closed for better seams and bigger millworks down in the city. The rough-cleared ground was growing close with slim birches now, so both of them saw the red like fire flickering and reflecting off the paper white trees. As they walked the glow became an ember point of light, and the point became a bird, and the bird rushed away up the stream ahead of them. Sasha Mikhailovich said nothing, and walked faster.

When they came to the old mill Mikhailovich, who had the innate balance of a high-wheel bicycle, simply shook his head, so you could see for a moment he had eyes under all the shaggy hair, and stepped up to the wall. Sasha lifted himself up onto Sasha Mikhailovich’s shoulders, and then to the top of the wall, reaching back to pull Mikhailovich after him. 

The water at this end was still as glass, and churning under the weight of the waterfall. Nothing else moved while they knelt there, until eventually a leaf fell into Sasha Mikhailovich’s hair. 

“Maybe he’s all right,” he said, turning to Sasha. But only day and evening had passed, and the nixie had told him he would not go until the night was gone. You could feel summer still steeping through the air and water in theclearing, still alive. The nixie had not left, only gone to sulk somewhere. But when Sasha felt in his pockets, he remembered he had not brought anything to give. 

He slipped the violin case off his shoulder, and the little violin weighed even less this time as he lifted it from its nest. He tried a few notes, running down the strings and learning how to circle the delicate neck, not too tightly. For lack of anything better he found the first notes to the lullaby that Zhenya liked best, that old one from the south, which has been rewritten many times and now is sung _sleep, my child, while the moon watches over your cradle, and I will sing you stories,_ and goes on for very long time after that about the boys who grow up to be vityaz, and all the wars the mountains there have seen. Sasha Mikhailovich watched for a few measures, the way he always did, and then began to sing in his surprising rough velvet voice. Sasha decided to be gracious when he got the chorus wrong.

If the nixie had wanted, the surge of water would have knocked them both over and onto the rocks below when the nixie surfaced. But Sasha was cradling the violin, and while he had to rock back onto his heels the water curled away between his feet with no danger. Next to him Sasha Mikhailovich squawked and splashed and then fell deadly silent as the nixie hauled himself up on rather shocking arms, elbows hooked on the top of the wall between them.

“I know that one,” he said to Sasha.“And I don’t know him.”

“Practice is good for you,” Sasha told him. “Are you leaving?”

The nixie ducked his head to his crossed arms, so his hair slicked across his eyes. “I don’t want to,” he said. “I only have to. Seven years are ending, and the White Tsar will call every spirit home, to see how much we’ve won.” He spat the last won, and shook the hair out almost as if he were going to dive again.

“Oh, I see,” Sasha said, who didn’t particularly. “But you come home after?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think—“ the nixie said, and bit himself off. “It’s how we decide who fights for us, when it comes. And I do not want to lose.” 

“All right,” Sasha started. “You’re all right. Then we’ll find, you—“and stumbled over it.

“You may call me Nicke,” the nixie said into his arms.

He was turning, pulling back from the edge of the water, and Sasha was leaning after him when he thought again of the dangers of promising when he didn’t know what would happen after that.

“Sasha,” Mikhailovich said, and everything in his voice was home. Sasha’s mind caught at the sound so he could turn into it, back. 

But that was only because he hadn’t been caught properly. Sasha Mikhailovich only had eyes for the nixie, adoring blue, and he had just given a spirit his name. 

“No,” Sasha said. “Oh, you blessed bloody idiot.”

Sasha Mikhailovich’s eyebrows came together, his mouth working against the air. He took a step forward, and back, at the edge of the water.

“Sam,” he said. “Don’t—“ and “I—“

“Oh, shut up,” Sasha told him. “You’re the baby anyway.”

“No I’m not,” Mikhailovich said.

“What?” said the nixie.

“He can’t give you that,” Sasha told him. “It isn’t his, really.”

The nixie’s lip lifted, the tip of his tongue pressing against his teeth, tasting the word. “No?” he said.

“No,” Sasha said, teaching him the sound of it. “So he can’t come with you, if you need someone to. It’s mine.”

“Oh,” Nicke said, and Mikhailovich made desperate snoring sort of noise, and then the little white dog began to howl. A black-winged bird was flying overhead, and all of a sudden the night seemed pitch dark. It was still summer, but the summer was no longer quite as alive. 

Nicke hushed the dog, reaching blindly out to find its soft silhouette, still reflecting starlight. “Stay,” he told it, whispering, and again. And, “I need,” so low you would not have heard it if you had not known it was there. 

“All right,” Sasha told him, and he would not remember what came after that for quite some time.


End file.
